From Brent Lang and Matt Donnelly’s Variety story (filed on 11.28 at 10:189 am) about the attempted censoring of Robert DeNiro‘s speech at last night’s Gotham Awards:

“A source close to the film denied that there was any censorship involved and said that the incident was a miscommunication. There had been multiple versions of De Niro’s speech and there was a desire to focus solely on the moviemakers and their artistry, according to the source. Apple and the filmmakers were unaware that De Niro hadn’t signed off on the final draft, the insider added.”

Translation: “We [Apple] tried to politically sanitize DeNiro’s speech. In hindsight we realize we shouldn’t have done this, But to protect ourselves now, we’re going to deny everything and call it a miscommunication.”

The Nikki Haley campaign is, at heart, a classic Republican pride campaign — a valiant attempt to keep alive notions of conservative Reagan-esque sanity. Which isn’t my deal, just to be clear — I’m a Gavin Newsom-Pete Buttigieg-Gretchen Whitmer guy by way of sensible, anti-woke centrism.

Alas, Haley is attempting to prevail within the confines of a once semi-normal political party that over the last seven or eight years has been infected with tear–it–all–down, mule–like authoritarianism and dumbfuckism.

Haley can’t defeat The Beast or hope to persuade those millions of rural, anti-Democracy nihilists to vote sensibly, but if Trump were to drop dead she would almost certainly become the Republican nominee for the presidency and, given her age and gender and mental vigor and non-extremist views for the most part, would undoubtedly defeat Joe Biden in the general.

May December‘s Charles Melton has won the Gotham Award for Best Supporting Performance. Good, fine and congrats, but may I ask where this Melton energy came from? Why did this happen? What voting bloc rammed this through? What is this?

It is Hollywood Elsewhere’s opinion, due respect, that no less than eight Gotham nominees in this category delivered far more arresting performances than Melton.

HE’s best-of-the-best is The Holdovers‘ Da’Vine Joy Randolph, closely followed by BlackBerry‘s Glenn Howerton. HE’s #3, #4 and #5 picks are Ferrari‘s Penélope Cruz, The Taste of Things‘ Juliette Binoche and All Of Us Strangers‘ Claire Foy.

Then comes Jamie Foxx in The Burial (#6), Rachel McAdams in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (#7) and Ryan Gosling in Barbie (#8).

Then and only then comes the ninth–place Melton.

This is so sweet… charles melton you are so loved pic.twitter.com/SJCJfyPWaf

— e (@mellarkanti) November 28, 2023

The Outstanding Lead Performance award went to Lily Gladstone in The Unknown Country, a film that no one relatively few have seen or reviewed, to go by general impressions. The urge to socially and culturally celebrate Gladstone’s Killers of the Flower Moon Oscar campaign was the motivating factor here. Congrats to her handlers.

The Best Feature award went to Past Lives…yeesh. The Gotham voters really and truly live on their own tight little island.

Posted on 10.24.23:

Daniel Richtman is reporting that Jharrel Jerome is “in talks” to play the lead role of Mike in an untitled, racially-themed comedy from director Trey Parker and screenwriter Vernon Chatman.

Jeff Sneider reported about this last March. He noted that Parker and Matt Stone would produce alongside Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free.

Sneider: “Chatman’s script finds the past and present coming to a head when a young Black man who is interning as a slave reenactor at a living history museum discovers that his white girlfriend’s ancestors once owned his.”

This is an interesting plot hook? That a young black dude is…what, alarmed that ancestors of his white-ass girlfriend owned Mike’s ancestors during slavery? What is this supposed to be, an echo of Get Out or something?

Or a parody of the wokester currents that lay beneath Get Out?

Don’t look now but ancestral guilt is a totally meaningless notion. People behave according to the morals and ethics of the time that they live in…no more or less.

Remember the 2015 Ben Affleck embarassment when Finding Your Roots producer Henry “Skip” Gates, Jr. revealed that an Affleck ancestor had been a slave owner?

Affleck apparently feared that the wrath of outrage culture. Would it make a lick of sense for the p.c. crowd to scream “Affleck is descended from racists so he must be a closet sympathizer”? That would be a bone-dumb assumption, to put it mildly. But you know that at least some lefty wackazoids would have suggested this all the same.

HE excerpt: “‘Outrage culture‘ is running wild these days and Affleck, no dummy, is fully aware of the potential. Time and again the p.c. mob has read things in a cretinously simple-minded fashion and made absurdly broad conclusions as a result.

“For all Affleck knew, this ‘scion of racists’ idea could become an urban legend like Richard Gere putting a gerbil up his ass, and it could affect his financial and creative future.

“It’s nuts out there, really nuts. But Affleck didn’t want to characterize Twitter culture as stupid or deranged, which in itself could land him in hot water, so he decided to use the ‘really embarassed’ line, which is true, I’m sure, as far as it goes. Who wouldn’t feel shamed by this knowledge, but then again who was walking around during the early to mid 1800s with the moral convictions of a decent 20th Century person, let alone a veteran of our own time? Relatively few, I would imagine.”

Jerome is probably best known for his performance in Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight (’16). He played “Kevin”, the teenaged guy who gave that beach handjob to Ashton Sanders‘ Chiron.

Just allow me to believe what I’m seeing. Just make a credible effort and I’ll buy into it. This scene from Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (now 32 years old) made belief impossible. I felt insulted.

Read this 6.9.92 Kevin Costner interview piece (“Hollywood’s Superhunk Heads for Nottingham“), written by N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

Last night “Bob Hightower” posted an anecdote about director Mike Nichols. Residing in the comment thread for an HE article titled “Son of New York Theatre Stories,” it concerns the summer movie-house run of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff? and particularly the behavior of a certain New York projectionist.

“When Nichols’s first film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, opened in late June of ’66, he went to a theater in New York one afternoon to watch it with a paying audience.

“The film was out of focus. It kept being out of focus. And of course, no one in the audience complained.

“Nichols frantically ran out and up the stairs to the projection booth. He banged on the door. No one answered. He banged again. Nothing. So he pushed open the door and found the projectionist on the floor banging an usherette. Nichols crept out and left the theater. As Gregg Toland once said, ‘The projectionist is the ultimate censor.'”

HE correction: Toland probably meant to say “the projectionist is the ultimate arbiter.” Showing a film out of focus obviously doesn’t constitute censorship, but vandalism.

Mark Harris informs that the anecdote isn’t from his 2022 Nichols biography, but says “it certainly sounds credible.”

Well, I don’t find the story credible.

HE to Hightower #1: With the urgent knocking why wouldn’t the randy projectionist have gotten up and seen who it was, especially if the door was unlocked? He surely understood that women hate it when strangers burst into a room with intimate activity going on. If the projectionist wanted to keep things going with the usherette he would taken proper privacy precautions. It would have been one thing if the projection booth door was locked, but it obviously wasn’t. You can’t tell me he didn’t hear Nichols knocking.

HE to Hightower #2: Projection booth floors are made of hard plastic tiles or plain cement. Who would attempt to make love to an usherette on one of those awful uncarpeted floors? What kind of usherette would submit to this? Women like their romantic encounters to be nice and soft and candle-lit. I would expect that most projectionists and usherettes would avoid the floor and attempt the deed standing up. Or perhaps with the usherette bent over the reel-spicing table, say.

One thing that’s always bothered me about Virginia Wolff is that George and Martha’s young guests — George Segal‘s Nick and Sandy Dennis‘s Honey — arrive around 2:30 am. The four of them have already been to a previous faculty party which presumably started at 8 or 9 pm, and now it’s five or six hours later and they’re about to start drinking and chit-chatting again? Even at the height of my most rambunctious youth I never showed up anywhere — a friend’s home or a bar or anything — at 2:30 am. During my drinking days I might’ve crashed at 2:30 or 3 am, but I never partied until dawn killed the moon…never. And I was a wild man, relatively speaking.

As much as I respect Milos Forman‘s Amadeus (’84), I haven’t had the slightest desire to rewatch it over the last 39 years. This is due to my profound, never-forgotten loathing for Tom Hulce‘s performance as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Not to mention that awful white lion’s-mane wig that he wore. Perhaps others feel this way also.

But if I could somehow re-experience my viewing of the B’way stage version with Ian McKellen and Peter Firth, I would do so repeatedly.

From “Respect for Milos Forman,” posted on 4.4.18: “Sometime in ’81 I saw Peter Shaffer‘s Amadeus at the Broadhurst, and revelled in Ian McKellen and Peter Firth‘s performance as Salieri and Mozart. It was such a huge, radiant high that I had difficulty adjusting to Milos Forman’s film version, which opened in September ’84.

“It was a handsome, well-crafted thing and a Best Picture Oscar champ, of course, and like everyone else I…well, appreciated F. Murray Abraham‘s Salieri. But Forman’s film just didn’t have that same snap and pizazz, and I hated Thomas Hulce‘s giggly-geek performance as Mozart and flat-out despised Elizabeth Berridge‘s bridge-and-tunnel performance as Constanze Mozart (i.e., she called her husband “Wolfie”).

“Amadeus is a good film but the play was much better.”

The VyceVictus praise is yet another measure of proof that Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers (which begins streaming tomorrow) is happening with slightly older Average Joes. That doesn’t mean the assisted living crowd but anyone who thinks and feels outside the realm of Millennials and Zoomers…people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, etc. Or X-factor under-40s, who exist in certain pockets. All hail ’70s filmmaking chops, which are just as great now as they ever were.

Thoughts on THE HOLDOVERS: https://t.co/4JjOz5v1vO pic.twitter.com/ryPxg0F8zt

— VyceVictus (@VyceVictus) November 26, 2023

Sasha Stone and I recorded the latest Oscar Poker on Sunday, 11.26, around 1:30 pm. Here’s a link.

Incidentally: Hollywood Elsewhere continues to take exception to the strange absence of Black Flies, which Open Road has obviously yanked from its previously-slated late November release date.

An assaultive, high-velocity, rough and tumble capturing of the lives of Emergency Medical Technicians in Brooklyn, Black Flies may not be a great, earth-changing film but it’s certainly a respectable one while being a close relation of Martin Scorsese‘s Bringing Out The Dead (’99). We discussed this situation towards the end of the podcast.

Again, the link to the latest.

Another recent re-watch was Oliver Stone‘s Savages. I panned it 11 years ago, but for some reason it didn’t go down all that badly two nights ago. It didn’t greatly bother me, and I really enjoyed Benicio del Toro‘s cartel enforcer, “Lado” Arroyo.

Posted on 7.6.12: Savages is about a couple of youngish, very flush Laguna Beach pot dealers (Taylor Kitsch‘s “Chon”, Aaron Taylor-Johnson‘s “Ben”) somehow failing to grasp the obvious when a Baja crime cartel tells them they want to distribute their potent product and split revenues 80-20. Which basically means “game over” and “time to move to Indonesia” because the Mexicans are fiends who will chew them up and spit them out one way or the other.

John Travolta‘s character, a corrupt DEA guy, explains that the cartel, run by Salma Hayek‘s “Elena” and enforced by Benicio’s “Lado”, is basically Walmart and that “they want a Ben and Chon section on aisle three.”

The guys intend to make a run for it while pretending to play along, but Elena smells duplicity and orders their girlfriend Ophelia, a.k.a. “O” (Lively), kidnapped. And once that happens it’s war — theft, hijackings, frame-ups, burnings, counter-kidnappings, etc.

I made a point of reading Don Winslow‘s “Savages” before catching the film, and was fairly taken with it. I love Winslow’s tight sentences and smack-dab phrasings, and the way it reads like a screenplay. So despite the beating Savages has taken on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, I was hoping for at least a modicum of satisfaction. Some of the book had to rub off.

To me, that didn’t happen. At all. I felt assaulted and trapped and underwhelmed all through Savages. Almost nothing but pique. The first thing I said to a friend as I left the theatre was “why did they even make this thing? Who could possibly like this or recommend it with any enthusiasm?”

I was “directing the movie” as I read Winslow’s book, of course, and in my version the action was fast and brutal, like in real life, but I didn’t wallow in it. And the actors didn’t “act” — they read their lines flat, fast and straight. They just about threw them away, which is what you more or less have to do when you’re dealing with “I think we’ve struck gold” and “I had orgasms — he had wargasms.”

Stone does the opposite, for the most part. He whips up the visual energy every which way, glossing and flashing it up like there’s no tomorrow. And flaunting the spilt blood, gougings, torturings. All you want is for the killing and the sadism to ease up a bit, for Stone to go the “less is more” route. A touch of suggestion, imagination…not a chance. And the three leads — Taylor Kitsch, Aaron Johnson, Blake Lively — drop their on-the-nose lines like spoonfuls of mashed potatoes on the kitchen floor, “acting” with their eyes and smiling too much and pretty much murdering the potential coolness at every turn.

Narration is almost always a bad idea, but especially so with an action film. Lively is the narrator here, and her opening line — “Just because I’m telling this story doesn’t mean I’m alive at the end of it…it’s that kind of story” — is, no offense, terrible. I bought Joe Gillis narrating his own Sunset Boulevard saga from the morgue, but Lively saying she may or may not be dead at the end…forget it.

Posted six and a half years ago — 6.17.17:

“There were brawls. I had guys die. You know, the show would end and someone’s still sitting there and then you realize they’re never getting up. I had a projectionist die one time in the booth. I heard the crowd booing, and then the movie’s off the screen. This is when there were carbon arc projectors, so a lot of times these projectionists would just fall asleep or they’d be screwing somebody up there and they’d forget to change the carbon arc.

“So I go up there…and the guy’s dead on the floor. I called the cops, and then I thought — this is how sick you’d get after being in New York for a few years in those days. I thought, ‘This is my big chance to actually shame a New York audience.’ So I went into this theater and I looked at them, and I said, ‘I’m very sorry for the inconvenience [but] the projectionist has passed away. We have someone going up there now, and your film will be on shortly.’ And they booed me!” — Savages author Don Winslow recalling a Times Square movie-theatre gig in the ’80s, reported by Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice.

True story #2 (i.e., my own): I worked as a Brooklyn theatre manager sometime in ’79 or early ’80. I honestly forget the name of the theatre, but it was a midsize house that played mainstream films. I remember telling the guy who’d hired me that I’d been a licensed projectionist in Connecticut and that I’d worked at the Carnegie Hall and Bleecker Street Cinemas under Sid Geffen, which was true.

So I got the gig, but I became bored with the job very quickly. On top of which I was never all that reliable about keeping track of ticket sales and whatnot. I wasn’t skimming — I just wasn’t an efficient mathematical type. And then I decided to play Warren Zevon‘s Excitable Boy over the theatrical sound system before the show began. And I didn’t play it quietly — I had the sound levels up to at least 7 or 8. I was eventually canned, of course. The story of my life from the time I was 17 to the launch of Hollywood Elsewhere in August ’04 was “and then I got fired.”

True story #3: I once led a small rebellion inside the old Regency Theatre (1987 Broadway, New York, NY 10023). It happened in the late ’70s. It was during a weekend showing of North by Northwest. Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint were on the train from New York to Chicago, and then the projectionist skipped a reel and suddenly Grant was in the cornfield dodging bullets from the biplane. Or something like that.

I was up in a flash and running upstairs to the booth. I knocked sharply on the door…’Yo, hello?’ (rap, rap, rap). Two more guys came up to join me, and then a third and a fourth. No response from inside so another guy stepped up and knocked on the door with me. The projectionist came out, saw the angry crowd and freaked. He was like The French Connection‘s Marcel Bozzuffi when he was cornered by that MTA official on the speeding subway car…’Get back!…get back!’ We told “Marcel” about his error (he obviously hadn’t been watching the screen). He eventually calmed down and fixed the problem.